"the President of the United States was not informed of the engagement order – it did not originate from him, and for several hours after the order had been given and the special ops forces were preparing for action into Pakistan from their position in Afghanistan, Daley successfully kept Obama and Jarrett insulated from that order."

"The operation was at this time effectively unknown to President Barack Obama or Valerie Jarrett and it remained that way until AFTER it had already been initiated. President Obama was literally pulled from a golf outing and escorted back to the White House to be informed of the mission"

Worthless clip reducing both men in my estimation and conveying little or no information. If anyone followed the link to listen to the second half please let us know if there was anything of value there. Blogger ate my first response so let this be it from me.

While interesting and possibly devastating if true, has it corroborated by any other sources?

Not to my knowledge. Some of the snips in the UK Telegraph dovetail with it, but not enough to confirm it, in my estimation. Not really sure how it can be, unless maybe one of Hillary's people starts leaking.

It's too bad they did not get bin Laden under such circumstances that they would have had to take him alive and bring him back with them.There would hardly have been any choice but to take bin Laden to Guantanamo for the duration, and Eric Holder to a padded cell at Bellevue.

1) it came out very quickly after the capture. I *believe* the initial leak was within 24 hours (will check). I find it hard to believe a fake could be churned out that quickly and still remain true to the character and movements of the individuals involved. So it reads to me like a play-by-play account.

2) the author doesn't pretend knowledge he doesn't have access to. He doesn't speculate on who was in the room, he simply says "I don't know who the 3rd was".

I would prefer the source not out himself atm. Besides, the NYTs et al ran far more than this with their anon single sources. So I'm happy to make this the narrative of what really happened the day they took OBL down.

This had to be the most expensive assassination in history. I'm glad they got him, and am amazed at the heroism of the men who did, but the time and money it took to get them there does not really describe a very effective operation. I have great hope for the value of it in demoralizing the enemy though, so it may well prove to be worth the cost.

Ned: As for the narrative/story on obama NOT making THE decision...I buy it. How else do you explain he decided to hit the links?

It does address the pattern of incompetence we saw from Team Obama before and after the kill. That momentary flash of effective leadership organizing and executing the strike was because someone else was in charge.

I was surprised at this, since I have long thought that if bin Laden was ever found, he would be found living in an upscale neighborhood in Karachi or Islamabad itself.

When I saw the pictures of this "lavish" mansion compound, I said it looked more like a prison, but that was not right. On another blog, someone wrote that it looked like the police headquarters on the frontier of just about any third world around the world, and yes, that is exactly what it looks like.

The "mansion" is also just six years old, but already the stucco was flaking off in sheets. Does not that just about confirm it as a government project?

I suspect bin Laden has been rather irrelevant for some time, and I think his lifestyle here confirms that. I think his own money has long been successfully frozen by other unsung U.S. agencies, and that this hide-out was provided by "elements" within the Pakistan government. Other "elements" may well have resented this, or they just found out and tipped the CIA. Perhaps when the host agency in Abbottabad applied to Islamabad for funds to re-stucco the walls and spruce up the interior.

David Corn's assertion that the fact of OBL's death will "subsume" the White House's difficulties in the immediate aftermath is less likely to hold up the longer Obama continues his weekend at Osama's routine.